Month: June 2017

Whatever the merits of undertaking a line by line critique of the Australian Curriculum, it would take a long time, it would be boring and it would probably overshadow the large, systemic problems. (Also, no one in power would take any notice, though that has never really slowed us down.) Still, the details should not be ignored, and we’ll consider here one of the gems of Homer Simpson cluelessness.

In 2010, Burkard Polster and I wrote an Age newspaper column about a draft of the Australian Curriculum. We focused on one line of the draft, an “elaboration” of Pythagoras’s Theorem:

recognising that right-angled triangle calculations may generate results that can beintegral, fractional or irrational numbersknown as surds

Though much can be said about this line, the most important thing to say is that it is wrong. Seven years later, the line is still in the Australian Curriculum, essentially unaltered, and it is still wrong.

OK, perhaps the line isn’t wrong. Depending upon one’s reading, it could instead be meaningless. Or trivial. But that’s it: wrong and meaningless and trivial are the only options.

The weird grammar and punctuation is standard for the Australian Curriculum. It takes a special lack of effort, however, to produce phrases such as “right-angled triangle calculations” and “generate results”. Any student who offered up such vague nonsense in an essay would know to expect big red strokes and a lousy grade. Still, we can take a guess at the intended meaning.

Pythagoras’s Theorem can naturally be introduced with 3-4-5 triangles and the like, with integer sidelengths. How does one then obtain irrational numbers? Well, “triangle calculations” on the triangle below can definitely “generate” irrational “results”:

Yeah, yeah, is not a “surd”. But of course we can replace each by √7 or 1/7 or whatever, and get sidelengths of any type we want. These are hardly “triangle calculations”, however, and it makes the elaboration utterly trivial: fractions “generate” fractions, and irrationals “generate” irrationals. Well, um, wow.

We assume that the point of the elaboration is that if two sides of a right-angled triangle are integral then the third side “generated” need not be. So, the Curriculum writers presumably had in mind 1-1-√2 triangles and the like, where integers unavoidably lead us into the world of irrationals. Fair enough. But how, then, can we similarly obtain the promised (non-integral) fractional sidelengths? The answer is that we cannot.

It is of course notable that two sides of a right-angled triangle can be integral with the third side irrational. It is also notable, however, that two integral sides cannot result in the third side being a non-integral fraction. This is not difficult to prove, and makes a nice little exercise; the reader is invited to give a proof in the comments. The reader may also wish to forward their proof to ACARA, the producers of the Australian Curriculum.

How does such nonsense make it into a national curriculum? How does it then remain there, effectively unaltered, for seven years? True, our 2010 column wasn’t on the front of the New York Times. But still, in seven years did no one at ACARA ever get word of our criticism? Did no one else ever question the elaboration to anyone at ACARA?

But perhaps ACARA did become aware of our or others’ criticism, reread the elaboration, and decided “Yep, it’s just what we want”. It’s a depressing thought, but this seems as likely an explanation as any.

It is very brave to claim that one has found the stupidest maths exam question of all time. And the claim is probably never going to be true: there will always be some poor education system, in rural Peru or wherever, doing something dumber than anything ever done before. For mainstream exams in wealthy Western countries, however, New Zealand has come up with something truly exceptional.

A rectangle has an area of . What are the lengths of the sides of the rectangle in terms of .

The real problem here is to choose the best answer, which we can probably all agree is sides of length and .

OK, clearly what was intended was for students to factorise the quadratic and to declare the factors as the sidelengths of the rectangle. Which is mathematical lunacy. It is simply wrong.

Indeed, the question would arguably still have been wrong, and would definitely still have been awful, even if it had been declared that has a unit of length: who wants students to be thinking that the area of a rectangle uniquely determines its sidelengths? But, even that tiny sliver of sense was missing.

So, what did students do with this question? (An equivalent question, 3(a)(i), appeared on the first exam.) We’re guessing that, seeing no alternative, the majority did exactly what was intended and factorised the quadratic. So, no harm done? Hah! It is incredible that such a question could make it onto a national exam, but it gets worse.

The two algebra exams were widely and strongly criticised, by students and teachers and the media. People complained that the exams were too difficult and too different in style from what students and teachers had been led to expect. Both types of criticism may well have been valid. For all of the public criticism of the exams, however, we could find no evidence of the above question or its Exam 1 companion being flagged. Plenty of complaining about hard questions, plenty of complaining about unexpected questions, but not a word about straight out mathematical crap.

So, not only do questions devoid of mathematical sense appear on a nationwide exam. It then appears that the entire nation of students is being left to accept that this is what mathematics is: meaningless autopilot calculation. Well done, New Zealand. You’ve made the education authorities in rural Peru feel very much better about themselves.